‘When I think back,’ he continued, his voice humming with the after-effects, even now, of what had been left behind of that family, ‘turning up there, having to process that, it was probably the moment I realized I was done. Cops who go on for ever, seeing shit like that all the time, I admire their resilience, but that wasn’t me. I wasn’t being paid enough to lie there awake every night, staring into the dark, seeing images of a nine-year-old’s brains up the walls and his guts on the bed sheets.’

‘But what you’re doing now is better?’

‘I guess it’s easy to leave your principles at the door when the money’s good.’ He smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘Anyway, a couple of days in, a case comes up on the computer that bears a resemblance to mine. I’m thinking to myself, “Could they be connected? Could this be the same killer?” This one was down in London, though – in New Cross.’ He was eyeing me, seeing if I’d caught up with him – and I had. I knew exactly where this was going now, and as it hit home, the entire room felt like it was spinning. ‘I figured it was worth a closer look,’ Mills went on, ‘so I got one of my team to call up the detective who was handling the case and they asked him about it, to see if we could help each other, but he just shut us down. He was fucking rude. He told my DC that our cases were different, they happened miles apart, that there weren’t enough similarities, that he didn’t have time to go chasing false leads and false hope. I mean, he was right, because in the end, they weren’t connected, but I had a family of four and he had a family of three: a mum and her twin daughters. You can see why I got someone to call him.’

We looked at each other, the room silent.

The detective that Mills’s team had talked to had been Healy. The mother and her twin daughters had been the case that had destroyed his life. His marriage. His career. It was the case that had set Healy on the road to a breakdown, to homelessness, a heart attack, to perpetual thoughts of suicide – until, eventually, he’d faked his own death and started again in Devon. That case was the reason he’d become Bryan Kennedy.

And Mills had figured it out.

Maybe not everything, but enough.